In the first article of a three-part series, David Chisnall examines the current state of the CPU industry. For the first time in years, there's real competition between CPU manufacturers. Part 1 looks at the general trends in the industry.

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The past few years have been very depressing for anyone watching the
microprocessor market. The most elegant architecture, the Alpha, was canceled
due to promises from Intel about Itanium. Itanium, while an interesting
approach, failed to sell more than trivial numbers of systems. Sun’s SPARC
offerings were so bad that Sun was shipping re-badged Fujitsu SPARC64 chips, and
IBM seemed to be focusing entirely on the embedded market with its PowerPC
offerings and the "you can’t afford this" market with its POWER
chips. Intel was stuck with a dead-end architecture that drank power, ran at
high clock speeds, and didn’t offer much performance. Only AMD seemed to
be producing anything interesting, and that was based on the architecture that
we’ve all come to hate.

Recently, this situation has changed. IBM is still selling POWER systems for
more than most people can afford, but is blurring the lines between POWER and
PowerPC and pushing PowerPC systems for Linux. IBM is also producing the CPUs in
all of the current generation of consoles, including the Cell, which we’ll
look at a bit later. Sun’s CPU division has woken up and begun producing
some quite unusual designs. Intel is still trying to make Itanium useful, but
has ditched NetBurst in favor of a much-improved microarchitecture. AMD’s
current generation is now looking a little dated, but its next generation is
just around the corner.

This article looks at general trends within the industry. The next two parts
of the series will focus on individual architectures, and the products we can
expect to see in 2007.